It’s hard to get three howlers into one paragraph, but the Australian’s rookie media columnist Chris Mitchell managed to do just that on Monday in a piece about why politicians should ignore Twitter and its left-wing slant. “At my age most of my gay friends think the idea of applying conventional heterosexual marriage to the once strongly countercultural principals [sic] of Stonewall in 1973 [it was 1969] is an appalling sellout,” the former editor-in-chief of the Oz wrote. “But try saying that on Twitter without a mass pile-on, a la Sonya [Sonia] Kruger.”
Unfortunately for Mitchell the mass pile-on on Twitter came not for his views on marriage equality but for the quality of the column itself. It’s clear Mitchell is enjoying himself in his new role as commentator, free to lambast all his pet hates. Such as Twitter. Mitchell: “Twitter is the worst. I would call it little more than a left-wing echo chamber for various highly politicised activists, including many journalists. This is not surprising since it was actually invented as a way for pop stars to talk to their fans rather than to discuss serious issues.” We don’t know where he got the pop star theory from but we rather like it.
Reading Chris Mitchell’s takedown of twitter just now has really made me question my life choices. Like reading Chris Mitchell for example.
— Jonathan Green (@GreenJ) August 7, 2016
Chris Mitchell says politicians should ignore 12 million Australians on Facebook. Focus on the 75000 subscribers to the Australian I guess.
— Je Suis Paris (@DavidParis) August 8, 2016
He also suggested readers might like to see for themselves just how biased lefty journos such as Paul Bongiorno or Crikey’s Bernard Keane are on Twitter. Helpfully, he provided instructions on how to use the social media platform if you’re like him and don’t want to engage.
“If you have never done so, Google their names with the word Twitter, call up their feeds and check for yourself.” Genius.
SBS women’s sports site dropped
In January SBS launched a dedicated women’s sport site, saying it was time for attitudes towards women in sport to evolve. In a piece on the site, SBS sports reporter Lucy Zelic said Zela was “just one step towards change”. “It’s a place where you are free to express your opinions, where the courage of your conviction is applauded not reprimanded and where you can be yourself with the hopes that one day, the world too, can share our views.”
But just eight months on – in the middle of the Rio Olympics – we hear the spirit of Zela has died. The spin from SBS management is that it was always a trial and was intended for review at the end of the financial year. “We’ve decided that whilst we won’t continue the site in its current form, women’s sport continues to be a priority for the network and best-placed to be incorporated within our other successful cross-platform sports offering,” a spokeswoman said.
Insiders say it sadly didn’t get the hits it deserved, but the timing of the decision, as interest in women’s sport surges, is disappointing.
‘Australians aren’t stupid’ officially hyperbole
Andrew Bolt’s presentation of global warming in a segment on the Bolt Report might have been “hyperbolic” but was not inaccurate, the broadcasting watchdog has found. A viewer of Bolt’s show, when it was on Ten last year, had complained to the Australian Communications and Media Authority that a graph used by the global warming sceptic was “neither accurate nor scientific”. Acma said: “Much of Mr Bolt’s language was hyperbolic, such as, ‘great global warming scare campaign’, ‘Australians aren’t stupid’, ‘can’t be fooled for long’, ‘all that propaganda’, ‘scaremongers’, ‘there’s been no Armageddon’ and ‘no wonder’. The use of hyperbole indicated that Mr Bolt was giving his subjective personal opinion about the matters being discussed and was not presenting a concluded scientific position about global warming in the segment.”
Flight from the dailies
The exodus of journalists from daily journalism to PR continues. The former editor-in-chief of the Age Andrew Holden, with 30 years’ experience in the newsroom, has been appointed head of communications for Cricket Australia. Holden started his new gig this week. Also jumping to the dark side is one of the Australian newspaper’s Shanahans. Not political writer Dennis Shanahan but one of his sons, Leo. He is joining political pollsters Crosby Textor Group after a stellar run covering courts for the paper in Sydney, as well as business investigations and a stint on the now-defunct News Corp opinion site The Punch.
ABC on the back foot over Gaza
The ABC’s coverage of Gaza is a particularly sensitive area, and this week a story by Middle East correspondent Sophie McNeill from June had to be corrected because mistakes crept in after the reporter filed her story. The ABC apologised for the errors, which included 7.30 host Leigh Sales saying it was “almost impossible” for Palestinians in Gaza to seek urgent medical attention in Israel.
“The ABC concedes this exaggerated the real difficulties of Palestinians seeking medical treatment in Israel,” the correction said. The other error was referring to Gaza as occupied in an online version of the story. “The errors were introduced as a result of editing in Sydney.”
Wombat and Roosters stories prove costly
It’s been a bad week for media companies and defamation payouts. Fairfax Media was ordered to pay $300,000 to personal trainer Sean Carolan and Channel Ten was ordered to pay “substantial damages” and legal costs to former Liberal politician Michael Yabsley. Yabsley successfully sued Ten for a story by Adam Walters which was broadcast on the network in July last year. Yabsley, who now runs the Wombat Hollow political discussion forum in the NSW southern highlands, described the story Walters did on him as “fast and loose”. “The inescapable fact is that the material broadcast by Channel Ten about the Wombat Hollow Forum was full of lies, provided by the spasmodic, give away, tabloid publication Latté Life. Channel Ten fell for Latté Life’s lies, perversions and distortions hook, line and sinker.”
Walters, whose previous story about Sydney businessman Charif Kazal was extensively covered by Media Watch and later corrected by Ten, recently left the network.
In the Fairfax defo case, columnist Peter FitzSimons and the publisher were sued for defamation for stories in 2013 that implied Carolan’s personal training business Nubodi had conducted tests on Sydney Roosters rugby league players without their consent, passing them on to organised crime. In the supreme court, Justice Lucy McCallum said: “Inexplicably, however, Fairfax did not seek to prove that contention by calling a single football player to give evidence that he did not consent to have his blood tested in the manner that occurred.”
60 Minutes losses
Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes has taken a couple of hits recently and they had nothing to do with the reputational damage the show suffered from the kidnapping stunt in Lebanon for which Tara Brown and the crew were jailed for two weeks. Producer Stephen Rice left the network after the fiasco, and now two more staffers have followed, although for very different reasons.
Last month award-winning producer Rebecca Le Tourneau left the network after pleading guilty to a drink driving charge. This week the rival Seven network announced it had poached 60 Minutes reporter Michael Usher. Known affectionately as Musher, he was the public face of the show in the midst of the Beirut crisis. But now he has nabbed his ideal job as a senior reporter with Seven News, a job which apparently wasn’t available at Nine.
Although 60 Minutes may seem like the dream job for a TV reporter, the travel is less than conducive to family life, and most roving correspondents eventually find it too hard to keep up.
